Latest market data

Stock search

Requesting a list of references from job candidates is as
standard as requiring a resume, but some startup founders are
putting a unique spin on the traditional hiring routine.

At a recent event hosted by StartX, a nonprofit startup
accelerator for Stanford University students, a panel of
small-business owners expressed a range of approaches to
reference checks, from talking to the candidate's peers to
promising to call former employers after the first candidate
screening call.

Laura Borel, chief executive and co-founder of Nutrivise, a mobile app that makes meal
recommendations, has interviewed more than 100 candidates to
scale her team from two to eight employees since 2011. Calling
candidates' references is the final phase of Nutrivise's
hiring process and an important step, said Borel. But she
prefers to speak with the candidates' former colleagues rather
than their managers because she believes they give greater
insight into questions about teamwork, work ethic and
follow-through. She tends to ask the colleagues: What is your
least favorite part about working with the candidate? And,
when does the candidate call a project finished?

Meanwhile, Tony Lai, chief executive and co-founder of LawGives, an aggregator of legal
resources, uses an approach inspired by business book
Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That
Turbocharges Company Performance (Penguin Group, 2012).
During the initial screening phone call with candidates, Lai
asks if they are comfortable with him calling any of their
former employers at random. Gauging their reaction to his
surprising reference-check test shapes his impression of the
candidate, he noted. "If people are evasive, that just raises
red flags," he said. "You don't want to get to the very end of
the interview process and be surprised."

This approach helps to weed out second-rate candidates when
looking for ways to get through a stack of 200 resumes, which is
exactly the position Lai and his co-founder found themselves in
when searching for a chief technology officer.

Tech entrepreneur J. Scott Zimmerman, on the other hand, isn't
sure reference checks are all that helpful for startups. The
chief executive and co-founder of Xola, an online booking and marketing
system for travel that was founded in 2011, said he still goes
through the motions of calling references but questions how
useful it is.

"I proceed with caution about how I use that information to
substantiate our decision to hire a candidate," said Zimmerman,
whose company has five employees. If the applicant is coming from
a corporate environment, their references might provide some
helpful information, but not necessarily demonstrate their fit
for a startup environment, he said.

As new managers build confidence in their hiring process and
judgment, it's important they take information gleaned from
candidate references with a grain of salt.

"Reference checks are useful only to the extent that you do them
diligently," said Hayagreeva Rao, professor of organizational
behavior and human resources at Stanford University's Graduate
School of Business, in an interview. Because the references that
candidates supply typically speak well of them, he suggests
digging deeper than the initial reference pool.

For example, Rao advises asking references volunteered by the
candidate to suggest another colleague who might also be able to
speak about that potential hire. This approach allows the
potential employer to move beyond vetted referrals and gain a
more complete picture of the candidates' capabilities.